the psalms, the blues, the gospel truth

I DON'T KNOW IF I HAVE THE STRENGTH
WHAT IF I- WHAT IF I DON'T MAKE MY NEXT GOAL
I’M ON MY KNEES AND PRAYING THAT YOU’LL HEAR
YOU NEVER LEFT ME BEFORE AND
YOU SURE WONT LEAVE ME NOW (Wicks)

a friend of mine wrote this song and shared it with the crowd recently. as i read the lyrics, thinking about easter and the sacrifice of Christ offered to both God and man in an effort to reunite the two in deep and meaningful communion, i was impressed with how well my friend's lyrics seemed to reflect some of the same themes as the psalmist. in the psalms we read again and again how alone and helpless and subject humankind often feels (kinda tragic considering this autonomy was the thing that we wanted most in the cosmos) to the will of an invisible deity. we often catch ourselves saying things like 'all i can do now is pray' which carry with them a sense of spiritual and circumstancial impotence as the shoulders that have been humbled and bowed by whatever burden of fallenness has settled this week eventually are incapable of anything more theologically astute than a shrug.

yet our sense of aloneness is reduced in direct proportion to the number of people we hear from who are also feeling alone.

in 1997, TIME magazine named industrial angst rocker, trent reznor (a.k.a. nine inch nails) as one as one of the year's twenty five most influencial people:

Trent Reznor INDUSTRIAL ROCKER

Trent Reznor is the anti-Bon Jovi. He is the lord of Industrial, an electronic-music form that with its tape loops and crushing drum machines, harks back to the dissonance of John Cage and sounds like capitalism collapsing. But Reznor, with his vulnerable vocals and accessible lyrics, led an Industrial revolution: he gave the gloomy genre a human heart. It's been said that he wrote the first Industrial love songs.

...On the hit song Hurt Reznor sings, "I hurt myself today/ To see if I still feel/ I focus on the pain/ The only thing that's real." The Downward Spiral sold more than 2 million copies; earlier this year Spin magazine named Reznor "the most vital artist in music."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,986206-17,00.html

reznor is one of my all-time favourite artists because, call it what you will, his sadness offers the rest of us hope in that he reminds us that we are not alone in our feelings of disenchantment and pain. (originally posted at http://northvus.blogspot.com/2007/02/industrial-love-songs.html)

it’s knowing that somehow we are alone together that fosters hope within the most dire of circumstances.

it is the hope of the psalmist- that resolute 'yet i know that my Lord is able to rescue me' that often comes in the final strains of a psalm of lament- which is the poet's acknowledgement of God's sovereignty after having spent awhile unloading the burden.

bono recently wrote an introduction to the psalm installment of grove press' pocket canons. in it he states that:

Explaining belief has always been difficult. How do you expalin a love and logic at the heart of the universe when the world is so out of whack? How about the poetic versus the actual truth found in the scriptures? Has free will got US crucified? And what about the dodgy characters who inhabit the tome, known as the bible, who claim to hear the voice of God?

You have to be interested, but is God?

Explaining faith is impossible... Vision over visibility... Instinct over intellect... A songwriter plays a chord with the faith that he will hear the next one in his head.

One of the writers of the psalms was a musician, a harp-player whose talents were required at 'the palace' as the only medicine that would still the demons of the moody and insecure King Saul of Israel...

At age 12, I was a fan of David, he felt familiar... like a pop star could feel familiar. The words of the psalms were as poetic as they were religious and he was a star. A dramatic character, because before David could fulfil the prophecy and become the king of Israel, he had to take quite a beating. He was forced into exile and ended up in a cave in some no-name border town facing the collapse of his ego and abandonment by God. But this is where the soap opera got interesting, the is where David was said to have composed his first psalm- a blues. That's what a lot of the psalms feel like to me, the blues. Man shouting at God- 'My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me? (Psalm 22)

I hear echoes of this holy row when un-holy bluesman Robert Johnson howls 'There's a hellhound on my trail' or Van Morrison sings 'Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.' Texas Alexander mimics the psalms in 'Justice Blues': 'I cried Lord my father, Lord eh Kingdom come. Send me bakc my woman, then thy will be done.' Humourous, sometimes blasphemous, the blues was backslidin' music; but by its very opposition, flattered the subject of its perfect cousin Gospel...(Bono)

author francis schaeffer, in his essay Some perspectives on Art said that "If there is no continuity with the way in which language is normally used, then there is no way for a reader or an audience to know what the author is saying. (Schaeffer)

perhaps this is why Jesus came in the first place... to make the language of holiness as accessible as the language of fallenness and alienation…

as tom wilson of junkhouse quipped:

the devil gets all the glory
but it's Jesus that sings the blues...

interesting that Jesus invites us to share in his singing of the blues... to unite, as he did, blues and gospel- to become gospel, good news, for the other.